Spruce Pine

Of all the headlines to catch the eye post the recent hurricane fest on the East cost of the US, the batch relating to Spruce Pine garnered undue interest. Spruce Pine is a town of about two and a half thousand hardy folk, in Mitchell County, North Carolina. The town was founded in 1907, like many, on the railroad heading up to North Toe River from Erwin, down in Tennessee. There must be an inn, you mutter, and indeed you’d be right, the town is built around The Old English Inn, that still stands to this day, presumably sporting more neon than sawdust. Why then did Spruce Pine hit the wires? Well, look no further than the biggest employer in town. The subsidiary of one mysterious Belgian company you have probably never heard of: Sibelco. Sibelco is a mining company. A digger-upper. The company produces exotic sounding materials like feldspathics and olivine. It has a line in clays and glass recycling. It also digs up quartz rock and by luck of geology their mine in Spruce Pine is one of the very few sites in the world to be able to produce super pure quartz that is used to ensure the purity of molten silicon, that is then used to make top-end semiconductor chips. It is possible to use less pure quartz to make the same stuff, but it’s slower and more expensive, hence when Hurricane Helene ripped across the county and dumped two feet of rain on the town and closed the mining operations, there was some clenching of buttocks from those higher up the supply chain. It is a reminder of how fragile supply chains are, how interconnected the world has become under the bonnet, how intricate, tight, and dependent; and how steamy geopolitics and wild weather can so easily blow a gasket in obscure, but critically important locations. It’s also a reminder to re-read I, Pencil, Leonard Read’s timeless explanation of how a pencil is made. And a reminder, perhaps, to be positioned in assets that are scarce. Hmm. For those whose buttocks remain tight, there are reports the mine has reopened. Christmas need not be cancelled. Amen to that.